This Sunday, HBO’s ‘Succession’ Was The Antithesis Of Easter
Spoiler Alert: As the grave was said to be unable to hold Jesus for long, the internet could not contain this culture news.
(REVIEW) Logan Roy died on Easter Sunday.
Well, not exactly. As the timeline of HBO’s “Succession” remains somewhat vague, he could’ve died on any day. It just so happens that the episode — the third of the show’s fourth and final season — aired on the Sunday out of the year known most for its religious connection to resurrection. It just so happens that the episode contains the most anticipated event in current TV and devastating, profound expressions of grief that accompany the permanence of death.
Admittedly, the writing’s been on the wall, though, since the show’s first episode — and particularly since Logan, the patriarch of TV’s most dysfunctional family and by far its most derided media empire, established that he’d have to die before anyone else took over the company he built. After all, it wouldn’t be “Succession” without the actual succession.
It was a shock of an episode to see, a sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat-with-bated-breath-for-a-half-hour thrill that was surprising in its content but not in its caliber, which was just as perfectly executed as the show’s every other arc, dialogue and breath.
Brian Cox plays Logan Roy in the HBO series Succession.
There are 27 minutes of screentime between the first attempted call from the plane to tell the Roy siblings their dad is dying and the call that informs them the flight attendants have stopped CPR. It’s likely the attempts to revive and then resuscitate him went on at least a few minutes longer than that.
None of Logan’s kids are present for his death; they’re all attending the wedding of eldest son and woefully oft-forgotten Connor, and Logan is on a plane flying overseas to conduct business. From the dad whose trademark is the manipulation, neglect and abuse of his kids, this behavior is not unexpected but is tragic anyway.
Logan, who once proclaimed, “Everything in my life, I’ve done for my children,” died alone in a bathroom on an airplane. His kids were forced to say their final words through the phone (though Connor didn’t even get the chance) while a flight attendant with basic medical training performed chest compressions. It’s likely that Logan didn’t hear those words anyway; he’d been nonresponsive from the very beginning.
If he had, though, he’d have heard his kids panicked and mourning. It’s the excruciating, amplified experience of picking out a greeting card for a person who’s hurt you beyond repair, whom you’ve argued with, but whom you love dearly anyway.
They stutter through disbelief, best wishes and a final shot at conveying the pain they feel because of him.
“You’re going to be OK. Uh, because you’re — you’re a monster,” Roman says.
“I can’t forgive you. But, um, it’s OK,” Kendall says after.
Logan’s kids, even more so than the audience, were unprepared for him to die. At the most basic level, how can anybody be prepared for the death of a parent? At the level the Roys exist on, how can you prepare for the death of a man who’s for so long behaved like an immortal?
In just the episode before, Logan stands on a podium of makeshift copy paper boxes — a recreation down to the letter of a speech given by his real-life inspiration, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, when his company purchased The Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones & Co. in 2007 and Murdoch visited the Journal newsroom — to rant mostly nonsensical platitudes about revamping the newsroom. It presents, in a snapshot, the image of himself Logan has presented to everyone for the past four seasons: towering, terrifyingly successful and invincible.
It was always true, in any way that mattered. Logan survived health crises, no matter how severe. In business, he was always one step ahead, and he was able to outmaneuver his opponents with his own wits and the pawns at his disposal.
It’s a direct result of these things, however, that sets Logan further apart from his kids at the beginning of this season than he’s ever been. It means that his three youngest kids don’t show up to his birthday party, and he ends up eating dinner with only his security detail Colin — his “best pal” — for company.
It’s here that Logan poses the ultimate question: “You think there’s anything after all this? Afterwards?”
A conversation about heaven or any kind of afterlife is out of place for a calculated businessman who in the same moment declares that all people are “economic units.” But it’s an inevitable confrontation of morality that comes on a birthday, upon realizing his kids don’t like him, at the end of his life.
Colin is agreeable, saying he has a very religious father, but he doesn’t know what he thinks otherwise.
“That’s it,” Logan decides, after some back-and-forth. “We don’t know. We can’t know. But I’ve got my suspicions.”
Maybe he’s just concerned that there are no profitable markets in heaven. But Logan believes a man like him has no use for the afterlife — because he grasped so much power in this life that it has no allure, or because to believe in a life after death is to believe he could die at all.
That’s what makes this moment of death so harrowing. It’s completely unremarkable in every way; there’s no dramatic fall, no last laugh or final word. The audience doesn’t see him die and hardly sees him after, just vague shots of his profile and his chest, bared for the compressions and the defibrillator.
His death will have repercussions that will occupy the rest of the season, sure. He was as powerful a man as he claimed to be, and his kids hardly know how to walk out the door without him telling them which foot should go first.
But his death was just a death. It was unavoidable and it was banal, the two fates he fought tooth and nail against.
And his son, even in the end, couldn’t forgive him.
“Succession” is available to stream on HBO Max.
Jillian Cheney is Religion Unplugged’s Senior Culture Correspondent. She writes about film, TV, music, art, books and more. Find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.